The construction of Human Butt was at the time, an ambitious undertaking. I sat on the floor of a small apartment and went through several cassette and DAT tapes until I had what I thought would pass as a 2CD set of material. Thrilled by this new format, I put it together and flung it out into the world. It went out of print almost immediately. It took awhile (years) but we finally got around to re-releasing it. For many of you, this is a new record, for others, just an echo of a bygone era. Please enjoy these ancient ramblings from the last century. – Henry Rollins
Track Listing: CD#1: 1. Adventures Of An Asshole (Chicago 1989) 2. Kicked In The Ass By Adventure (Santa Monica 1989) 3. Smokin' The Filter (Hamburg Germany 1989)
CD#2: 1. Decoration (Santa Monica 1990) 2. Donate Your Bodies to Science You Fools! (Chicago 1990) 3. Romance (Lausanne Switzerland 1989)
On June 9 & 10 1990, I shard the McCabe's stage with Exene Cervenka and Hubert Selby, Jr. As I remember is was a good time. Thanks for listening. - Henry Rollins
Track Listing: 1. Exhaustion 2. Misunderstanding 3. I Wish Someone Had Told Me 4. Travel Tips
Welcome to the re-issue of my first attempts at a talking record release. For the re-release of Big Ugly Mouth, I figured I would embarrass myself totally and include my first ever talking release Short Walk On a Long Pier. It was initially a cassette only release and it took all the money I had. Later, a short run was made on LP in Canada and then it went out of print. So here it is again, first time on CD. It’s just awful. I figured if I put it in for free you couldn’t get too mad about how wretched it is. As for Big Ugly Mouth, we sent it to engineer supreme Phil Klum to even out the levels of the tracks and clear it up some so it should sound better this time around. Enjoy . . . or something. Thanks. --Henry
Sweatbox was a low budget, high ambition project. Originally it was a three LP set that I lugged by the box load on early talking tours. Eventually it hit CD on Quarter Stick where it resided happily for many years. Now, we're remastering and re-releasing all the early material on 213, upgrading sonically with ace engineer Phil Klum at the helm and adding tracks when we can. The previous Sweatbox is missing one track off the original LP. It was recorded in Budapest, Hungary where I was asked to read for some students before the Rollins Band show that night. Anyway, we added it on this version as an extra track at the end of disc 2. If it's too awful for you, you can always just hit stop! At least the set will be slightly more definitive. Also, it's great to have Phil Klum go over these tapes and do all that can be done to clean them up and even out the levels. Definitely what a re-release should be all about. I hope you like these ancient recordings. -- Henry Rollins
When we were in the studio making the Life Time album, we recorded the cover songs we played on the tour that has just ended. Taking advantage of the relatively new medium of CD, I stuck on a bunch of live stuff from the tour along with the studio tracks and put it out as a CD EP for really cheap. I figured it would do the band a good turn by letting people hear how we sounded live, which was what we were really all about. Thanks for listening. –Henry Rollins (2007 Los Angeles, CA
Track Listing: Rollins Band: Do It 01. Do It 02. Move Right In 03. Next Time Live Europe 1987 04. Joe Is Everything And Everything Is Joe 05. Black And White 06. Lost & Found 07. Followed Around 08. Wreck Age 09. Lonely 10. Hot Animal Machine I 11. You Look At You 12. Gun In Mouth Blues 13. Turned Out 14. One Thousand Times Blind 15. No One
Andrew Weiss - Bass / Sim Cain - Drums / Chris Haskett - Guitar / Henry Rollins - Vocal / Theo Van Rock - Hands Of Thunder Mix Messiah
Here we go again! This CD set documents the 2004 tour. The show happened at San Jose State Univ. in Northern California. A great crowd and I am glad it was the night we recorded. In the tradition of the last three volumes of Talk is Cheap, the CDs are long and low on edits and cost and of course, one dollar from each CD will be donated to Hollygrove in Los Angeles, CA (a home for abused and neglected children, www.hollygrove.org). The tour ended up being 91 shows and ended at the University of California at Bakersfield October 21st of 2004. Thanks for showing up, it was a great time I had out there with you. I hope you enjoy the show. The children of Hollygrove thank you too. - Henry Rollins
Another talking record from Sydney, Australia? What, is Sydney the only place in the world to record? Well, no but the Enmore is a swell theater and it’s always a two to three night stand and Randy makes high quality recordings there and so it works out. On the 2003 tour, I happened to be at the Enmore two years later to the day that we did Talk is Cheap Vol. 1 so it was too conceptually cool to not record. You can gather that Talk is Cheap Vols. 1 & 2 were recorded April 23 & 24 of 2001 and in the tradition of the earlier installments of the recurring bloviating nightmare, not a great deal of editing was done. Holding with tradition, one dollar from each copy of this set sold will go Hollygrove Children’s Services in Los Angeles CA. Thanks to your patronage of this series and other CD releases on the 2.13.61 label, we have been able to send Hollygrove in excess of $10,000 dollars at the time of this writing. We have kept the price at ten bucks even in these times of inflation. Why? Because talk is cheap and we’re all judged by what we do, not what we say. Again and again, I thank you. –Henry Rollins
Welcome back to the mouth that never shuts. The second night at the Enmore Theater. More stories, bile and ranting diatribes from your graying, limping philosophic misanthropic curmudgeon. In case you didn't read the liner notes from volume one of this set, your patronage of this two-CD set just liberated a dollar to Hollygrove in Los Angeles, CA (a home for abused and neglected children, www.hollygrove.org . Nice one! I like this two CDs for ten bucks deal. You never know, there may be more of this kind of thing coming. Stay tuned and thanks for checking me out. --Henry Rollins
The 2001 talking tour was long and took in many countries. We taped shows here and there to document the tour. I did a few nights at the Enmore Theater in Sydney Australia and we rolled tape on the first two nights. I decided to put them out as they were with very little editing sohere it is, with all my inherent motormouthed flaws ntact. A dollar from each set will go to Hollygrove in Los Angeles, CA (a home for abused and neglected children, www.hollygrove.org). I reckon ten bucks is a pretty good price. The price can also be an indicator as to how much CDs really cost to make and could possibly raise questions as to why they can be so expensive in stores these days. And, like the title suggests, talk is not exactly worthless, but should not be overpriced. As always, I am in your debt. Thanks. --Henry Rollins
A Negative Trend in Music: About 25 years ago, I found a single at Skip Groff’s Yesterday and Today record store that has remained one of my favorite 7” records of all time: The Negative Trend EP. Getting this record out has been a long standing ambition of mine and a labor of love to get over the wall. I hope you check it out and dig it. Here’s some info on the EP: Mercenaries (Shatter / Gray), Meat House (Shatter / Gray), Black and Red (Gray), How Ya Feelin’? (Waters / Gray) -- Steve DePace – Drums (Later in Flipper), Will Shatter – Bass (Later in Flipper), Craig Gray – Guitar (Later in the Toiling Midgets), Mikal Waters – Vocal -- Produced by Debbie Dub and Negative Trend, Engineered by Stu the hippy, June 1978 - San Francisco CA
A few months ago, I was in London, England and was asked to read on a BBC Radio show. I read this thing I wrote called "No Shore II" and talked about how the piece was a homage to the great American writer Thomas Wolfe who often spoke of there being "no door." Afterwards, I got to thinking about reading a few things in the studio for release to change things up from the usual live spoken recordings I put out. So, here’s some stuff I wrote, read aloud to brave and patient engineer Brian on the afternoons of September 16 & 23, 2003. I hope you enjoy it. One dollar from each CD sold will be given to the Hollygrove Children’s Services here in the doomed city of Los Angeles so these kids can grow big and strong and get the hell out of this town! Thank you. --Henry Rollins
[Tracks 1-5 from the book Solipsist, Tracks 6-15 previously unreleased, Track 16 from the book Broken Summers, all written by Henry Rollins.]